Atlas
by benignmilitancy
Summary: He's just a survivor. Same as the rest.


He's just a survivor. Same as the rest.

When Eli invites him to take a look around the lab, he's still thinking, off and on, of what Breen said back in the hydroelectric station: that the people of the Resistance consider him a savior.

At the time, the absurdity had struck him motionless for a few seconds. Slowly, the pieces came together. Kleiner's loss for words, Dr. Mossman's flustered monologue, the rebels handing over their prized Tau cannon without a single protest… No matter his reluctance to assume any kind of mantle for accomplishing the bare minimum, surviving a disaster many others before him have escaped, the larger picture he's assembled in his mind begins to make a gruesome amount of sense.

The farther away one carries an object from a light source, the larger and thinner its shadow grows; he'd entered the tram car Gordon Freeman, PhD, and emerged out the other end the One Free Man, lacking substance, namelessly evanescent. His form, distorted.

Eli jokes he never thought it'd take him this long to return. He responds with a thin, downcast smile as his old friend nudges him in the ribs with an elbow. He just isn't sure which version of him wanders through Black Mesa East. Somewhere, his shadow still flees, trapped in the old facility.

* * *

_Go to the surface, and let them know that we're standed down here._

Eli grasps his shoulders and shouts this into his good ear, over a klaxon's banshee shriek. Hard to believe his calm, gravelly voice was once smoothed over with youthful dread, trying to remain even for Kleiner's sake, the hitch in his breath betraying otherwise.

_Please, Gordon. All of our phones are out._

_Don't worry. _He can't say why his lips quirk into a smile_. I'll find it._

* * *

That was Eli years ago, you see, whose thoughts had been consumed by the welfare of his wife and his daughter, not quite three years old. Eli now, whose wife is already lost except in the confines of a torn photo, his daughter thankfully spared—Eli, who once vainly bemoaned his graying hair, now bearing a fine white crown around his scalp—briefly demonstrates the rotoscopic mechanism that houses a Xenian crystal. You can turn it any which angle you like, Gordon.

A toy to distract him, he notes, though the ploy baits him well enough. The needles click. The laser's warm hum reverberates in his ears. He leaked blood from a popped eardrum when the machine overloaded. This microcosm of the test chamber, although safely contained, makes his sense memory prickle and throb. You never quite forget the way an anti-mass spectrometer moans.

* * *

His goal propels his steps. Find the surface. Let them know there are survivors stranded in the bowels of the complex.

_Ah, rescued at last! Thank God_—

His guts swim at screams.

* * *

"We still don't know what that does," Eli remarks as he examines an amorphous substance floating in a jar, swishing its meniscus to one side. "Alyx brings in the strangest things."

He sets it softly down with an idle wonder: What has she seen of this place so far? Is it normal to her?

Numbing horror crumbles, relenting to solitude and tedium. His breath scrapes in time with his march down endless concrete halls, nerves crawling to the bursting point just below his grime-encrusted skin. The blood pounds between his temples, circulating thoughts through a mind with too much of nothing to perceive, and too little time to process.

Gordon cannot merely count the steps he's taken since leaving Eli and Kleiner down in the Sector C test labs; he must find a pattern, map with quadratic functions the path he's taken to ensure no one else follows the same hollow, lonely tread.

* * *

The newspaper article clipped to the corkboard has weathered with age, its blurred, smudged print making it a little difficult to read.

_Following on the heels of global slaughter, an emissary has stepped up to conduct emergency mediations between human and alien forces. Dr. Wallace Breen, former administrator to the Black Mesa Research Facility where this catastrophe began, issued a statement:_

There are no atheists in foxholes, Black Mesa says, or string-theory proponents in the Lambda Complex.

Gordon murmurs theories to himself, about why Earth proves amenable for alien organics native to a far less hospitable planet, why his atomic makeup hasn't been scrambled to hell by the various teleportative hoops he's jumped, why the resonance cascade continues to ripple nonlocally through spacetime. To an outside observer peering in, his antics would suggest a clear descent into insanity.

Anything but. Muttering theories between steps and bullets and deafening split seconds of terror tethers his mind to a world whose laws he can still grasp. He won't let himself slip through the gaps in sanity. One false step in the borderworld will cast him down. He refuses to give gaze to the abyss that stares back.

Planck's constant. Relativity. Quantum superposition. The common view used to be that the laws of science bended like a board, rigid, with only so much give. It may be more accurate to say they ebbed and flowed like liquid. It then follows he must flow with them.

There must be some solid support structure to give them coherence and shape, however—and he is going to find the truth, no matter how strange his route in getting there. Thy axioms and thy hypotheses, they comfort me.

Eli doesn't comment much on the article, only gives it a long, lingering look of resignation over his shoulder, as if trying to forget its contents. He releases a mild sigh before saying simply that than the Combine rewarded Breen with power for managing Earth's surrender.

Gordon recognizes something behind his cool statement of fact, though he won't voice it aloud. Eli's irises eyes waver as they lock with his, and he looks quickly away.

Breen's words ring hollow, to his scarce surprise. _"They assured me this is but a taste, a small sampling of what they could do. It would be borderline murderous of me to pretend any earthly force can stand against them." _The article continues its report in a dry, solemn tone. _Extensive negotiations continue in the Waldorf Tower._

A conference table riddled with bullet holes. Several high-ranking scientists lay piled behind its splintered halves. They'd tried using it as well as a greaseboard to shield themselves from the fire that sprayed the room, to little avail.

As Gordon rummages through their pockets for the necessary keycards, he hears a grunt complain_. Monsters, sure, but civilians? Who ordered this operation, anyway?_

Kill the soldiers patrolling the control room. Gun them down in the same short, brutish way his colleagues were cut down. Don't overrationalize the moral implications. Don't feel the liquid leaking from his corneas, his nostrils, or his swimming eardrum. Necessity. Always necessity. Their vocoders pool static, their blood crackles white noise. You've killed so many men like this today. Does that make you better, worse, or simply an instrument? I'm sorry. I'm—

Focus.

Launch the rocket.

* * *

"Sorry, Gordon, almost forgot to introduce you two. Have you met Ezekiel?"

"Ah." Eli's Vortigaunt assistant clasps his hand with a pronged claw, his skin smooth and amphibiously cold to the touch. "We have heard innumerable things about the Free Man, all of them favorable. It is a pleasure to make his acquaintance at last."

They know his name.

He can't waste time reflecting on the irony of working most of his life just to establish some credence behind those four syllables, only to abandon it when it starts gaining recognition. But as he runs through Black Mesa's cavernous limestone arteries, he realizes he has never wanted to hear his name spoken less.

Bullets won't erase it. If anything, they brand permanence into their minds. The military and the aliens—both chant it in guttural, unnerving, omniscient tones, chasing his clipping heels always—Freeman. Come here, Freeman. Wake up, Freeman. Be silenced. Be still. Die.

* * *

As blasphemous it would be to admit, he's pondered the consequences of giving up more than once. What would happen if he laid down his weapons and surrendered.

His past life sits cross-legged next to a sparking vending machine, watching its knifelike flashes carve gashes through the dark. A warm, unopened can of ginger ale lies clenched in his tremulous fist, its thin aluminum casing bearing dents.

He's goddamn exhausted. If he forcibly injects more processed sugar into his system, however, his overexerted, thumping-piston heart will surrender long before any bullet finds him.

Gunfire echoes, creeping ever closer. Inevitability prickles the short, fringed hairs at the nape of his neck. Black Mesa hums an electronic lullaby, heedless to the anguished cries being cut short inside her. He now knows what it's like, torn between the need to scream and the urge to sleep.

Weariness sags his limbs, his muscles fatigued by constant surges of adrenaline. Eli's voice compels him to remain awake for just a little while longer. _You've made a promise, Gordon; don't break it now. We're stranded down here._

He can't let them down. Got to get up. Got to keep moving, keep living. Got to will his leaden, stubborn calves into action however he can manage.

He's always been an instrument here, just an extra set of legs. He can't deny he still provides a material use, despite having resented the fact that Mesa seldom saw fit to exercise the mind that came attached to those legs; it would be a waste, sheer waste, to numerous friends and colleagues depending on him to let himself be slaughtered so soon.

He allows himself a grim smirk and pulls the tab on the ginger ale. He doubts Black Mesa will afford them a shred of dignity for their mistakes.

Keeping alive is a messy, humiliating task, cruel but necessary. If, to recover his dwindling energy, he must sit in the dark and watch the gleam of his HEV's battery light crawl over dead roach shells, then that's what he'll do.

As his eyelids droop, his mind clings to Eli's afterimage. Have he and Kleiner—?

No, don't think that. Don't picture them meeting the stock end of a SPAS-12. They need you. Stop being selfish and _move._

* * *

"Somethin' weighing on your mind, son?"

A soft inquiry and a concerned glance from his old friend breaks his concentration, turns him away from the radiant crystal fuzzing at its edges. "No." He can't say why his lips quirk into a smile. "Not really."

Eli smiles back just as wanly. "Now we both know that's a lie."


End file.
